


Do Not Stand At My Grave

by The Sports Section (Empress_of_Trash)



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Ghosts, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M, Necromancy, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Self-Indulgent, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Witchcraft, Witches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 21:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20881034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empress_of_Trash/pseuds/The%20Sports%20Section
Summary: Furihata Kouki had always believed in magic and fairy tales and ghosts. One day they decided they believed in him too.





	Do Not Stand At My Grave

Furihata Kouki jerked right out of his bed and slammed onto the hard wood of his bedframe. The scream caught in his throat, his heart pounding beside it and smothering any sound he might have made as he struggled to escape the material confining his arms. It took him several agonizing minutes of struggling with the mind numbing panic and eyes blurred for him to roll out of what he realized were his sheets gasping and tears falling freely. His entire frame shook as he mouthed soundlessly, head jerking back-and-forth taking in his _ bedroom _ with a strange mix of confusion and relief. 

His hand hovered nervously over his chest, hesitating at the phantom memory of agony so fresh in his mind. Slowly, he touched his chest, gingerly inspecting it and finding no injuries.

He kept shaking through the long gasping breaths it took to gain some calm. He was still shaky, eyes wet and tears falling, but he could breathe and his mind was quickly taking things in, noting the tiny details, quickly as Coach had beaten into him with her Hell Training Second Year.

He was in his bedroom. The same bedroom he'd had since he was ten years old and had finally been able to stop sharing with Kyo. 

The Western style bed his parents had given him when they replaced their own was taking up most of the room. He could see the train print sheets that he kept hidden by his comforter. It was covered in an excessive amount of pillows and blankets and a few carefully hidden stuffed animals he had been unable to part with which were in a disarray after his flailing. His train sets decorated his bookshelves along with his carefully built up but still painfully small, in his opinion, collection of books. His desk, the one his parents had bought to celebrate his getting into Seirin, was in the corner, neat with his book bag hanging on the chair and his uniform folded carefully on top. A nervous habit he'd started on his first week to insure he wouldn't be late trying to find clothes in the morning.

The room looked exactly like it had since his first day of high school three years ago.

It looked _ exactly _ like it had _ three years ago _.

The dent in his headboard Kagami had made while wrestling with Fukuda when they had been playing Monopoly second year was gone. The strangely detailed drawing Kawahara had done of Nigou after all the First Years got together to try alcohol Kyo had supplied wasn't over his desk any longer even though Furihata never had the heart to clean it off. The new train set he and Hyuuga had spent an entire Saturday building together when his senior had stopped by for a visit was no longer spread out in the place of pride on top of his bookshelf. All the pictures he'd gathered of his teammates over the years were missing. His medal from their Winter Cup victory First Year was obviously absent from where it usually laid beside puzzle box his grandmother had left him and the sea shells he'd collected during their only ever family vacation years ago.

This was his bedroom but _ wrong _.

The anxiety he'd barely just began repressing bubbled back up with a vengeance, sending his heart racing and his legs shaking as he forced himself up. He fumbled to his bedside searching frantically for his phone. He always made sure to keep it charged in case of team emergencies now that he was Captain.

It wasn't in the usual spot, but he could feel the knot in his chest relax as he found a familiar black flip phone, old but sturdy, hidden under a pillow. It still had some charge and Furihata opened desperate to get ahold of Kuroko.

This could, Furihata's panicked mind screamed, just be a very elaborate prank that Kuroko was playing to get back at him for letting slip to Momoi that he and Kagami were official before the other teen had a chance to tell the rest of his former teammates. Kuroko was definitely the kind of person to go to extremes if he felt wronged. 

Ice went down Furihata's spine as he went through his contacts and found huge swaths of numbers missing. None of his fellow third-years. None of the Senpais. None of his kouhai each marked with a different nickname. None of the other Captains he'd started chatting with. Even his brother's number was wrong, outdated. 

The thought made the breath still in Furihata's lungs as he fearfully glanced at the impossible date displayed on his phone.

"It's a prank," Furihata told himself, voice high pitched and quivering. 

It had to be. Time travel wasn't real and it certainly wouldn't happen to him. He was just _ Kouki _. He wasn't anyone important or unique. He'd become Captain, but Kuroko and Kagami were their stars, their Ace and Shadow. He wasn't even a Main Character in his own life. He was plain, unassuming, only good for supporting. He was proud of this fact and would walk through Hell with his teammates, but he was aware of his limitations. And something like this, impossible and horrifying sounded like something out of a Sci-Fi or Fantasy manga. It would happen to someone else. Like Kuroko or Kagami or any of the other impossible people Furihata had met throughout high school.

It wouldn't happen to the ordinary Furihata Kouki.

It _ wouldn't _.

"It's a prank," Furihata told himself more firmly, using the Captain Voice he had adopted for handling unruly younger classmen. 

He would go to school, finish up his last week before graduation and everyone would laugh at Kuroko freaking him out. The pain had all been just a nightmare and nothing had happened after practice last night when he'd helping his replacement, Miyoshi, get used to running practice as Captain.

Furihata felt his knees were weak, but his breathing steadied out and he went to grab his uniform to change into. As he took off his pajamas and looked down he felt the center of his gravity reverse as the world spun. 

He was _ scrawny _. All those muscles he'd built up over years of practice and training were gone. He was never a large guy, but he'd become proud of all the work he'd put in to become the Seirin Point Guard. 

Kuroko could do a lot and was willing to do it, but he couldn't change Furihata's body. Even Furihata's anxiety couldn't argue with that. 

But the most damning thing was right there in the center of his chest, exactly where he'd felt that excruciating agony. A bright, ugly red scar right above his heart.

Right where he'd been stabbed.

Furihata barely made it out of his room and to the bathroom he shared with his brother before he started throwing up. He was crying again and he felt his whole body shaking. It had been _ real. _All of it. He heard, like a noise through a long tunnel, pounding on the door and his mother's concerned voice. He couldn't answer gagging on nothing as he cried.

His nightmare had been real.

Furihata Kouki had been murdered last night.

. . .

Furihata didn't go to school that day, his _ first day _ ever it turned out. His mind was reeling and his mother was convinced he'd caught a stomach bug. Furihata didn't correct her, instead staring, trying to process the horror of what had happened. Kyo had promised to go in his stead to grab the paperwork and Furihata had just nodded dully at his brother, hair thick and brown no longer dyed like it had been since he'd gone to university. His mother left him alone to sleep, dropping off medicine and checking on him every few hours.

Furihata burrowed into his bed, hidden in the softness.

The thought of it being a nightmare had been bad enough. The closest thing to real violence Furihata had ever experienced had been in First Year when Akashi Seijurou had grazed Kagami with those scissors. Flashes of what happened kept hitting him, making him shudder and his stomach turn with each new detail. He felt vulnerable, open and injured even though he was fine. The thought of going outside the room was horrifying. Maybe if Furihata had been a bit more creative he could have convinced himself this was all a dream, everything. His death, his teammates, his whole high school life. But he had never been good at making things up. There was no way he could dream up everything that had happened.

Which meant he had to face what the scar showed. It was all real. 

Waking up after dying, after having been inflicted with that kind of violence would have been bad enough. It would have left Furihata lost and broken and terrified. Waking up in the past was somehow worse. The knowledge all of his friends, all of his growth, all of their work was gone ripped through him. If he had woken up after being hurt he could have called his team, his friends and would have been surrounded by the comfort of their bonds.

Those bonds were _ gone _.

It hurt worse than dying. The idea of being _ alone _ after having found a place where he belonged, where being Furihata Kouki was enough, was so much worse. 

The enormity of everything suffocated him and he couldn't move. Normally when he felt like this he could call someone. Fukuda and Kawahara would take him out and distract him with the arcade. Kagami would play him one-on-one until he was so physically exhausted and his mind was blissfully blank. Kiyoshi was always willing to listen. Tsuchida and his girlfriend would have Furihata over to their apartment for an impromptu lunch. Kuroko would listen to anything and everything without judgement no matter how odd.

Furihata's mind stalled as he realized abruptly exactly who he needed. _ Kuroko._ He was the only person he knew who would believe him. The only person he could think of who would listen and help him figure out what was going on. After all he was the only person Furihata knew who believed in the supernatural.

He grasped onto this idea desperately and it helped settled him, like a life jacket when sinking. He was scared and confused and his whole body felt like a live wire of anxiety, but he knew what he needed to do.

Thankfully, he knew exactly where he could find him.

. . .

Furihata had never been very creative. He enjoyed stories and loved reading, but he couldn't make up his own. It felt too much like lying and he was a terrible liar. But he appreciated when others could and enjoyed disappearing from the world and his own mind into another life as books allowed him to. 

He'd loved fairy tales and ghost stories growing up, despite being a coward. He would stay up all night reading them and then refuse to sleep for days. His parents had forced him to stop when he was younger, concerned by how he internalized all the stories. But he'd never lost his taste for them. His favorite stories were always fairy tales and romances, things with happy endings, but he appreciated the controlled fear of intentionally reading horror. After all, made up stories in which he was able to confirm the monster being defeated at the end was better than what his mind would scream at him.

Perhaps as a result of his love of them, Furihata had always been a firm believer in ghosts and the supernatural. He was superstitious and he didn't tell too many of his friends because he knew it was silly. There weren't actually fairies in gardens or ghosts haunting old classrooms or kappas in the pond at the park. Furihata knew this. But he could never escape the idea that there could be.

Hundreds and thousands of years of repeating the same kinds of stories, of different cultures having the same kinds of monsters appearing in different forms but with similar rules had to mean something. So, Furihata knew they _ didn't _exist. He just left room for the possibility. His anxiety helped with that inflating shadows and strange sounds into monsters and ghosts.

Kuroko had been the only one he'd ever told about this belief. They'd met due to basketball, but Furihata always believed they became friends because of books and stories. And strangely enough a ghost. 

They had started spending time together outside of class and practice because they were both on the Library Committee. Both had enjoyed volunteering to put back books at the end of the day. Furihata loved the peace of it and being surrounded by books. Flipping through them and organizing them made something settle inside him. Kuroko had shared the duty with him and once they'd gotten through the initial meeting (and Furihata remembered him consistently) they had begun to spend time talking together about books. Kuroko was the only person he could really talk to about reading. Furihata's favorite genres were considered odd choices for a teenage boy and he kept them to himself.

Kuroko though had started a conversation about them while they were putting up some English fiction and he had paused over a copy of _ Sense and Sensibility _.

"I know Fuirhata-kun enjoys stories with happy endings. Have you read any of Austen's books?" Kuroko had asked lightly. "I quite enjoy all of her works."

Furihata had hardly been able to contain himself at the realization that one of his friends read _ Jane Austen. _Furihata had a friend he could talk to about _ romance_. He hadn't been able to stop himself from beaming and Kuroko and he began happily talking about their favorite books and characters. With Kuroko already aware of his more secretive loves Furihata had happily started supplying him with recommendations for romances and eventually fairy tale collections. Offering his own copies when the library failed to have some. Kuroko had responded by, upon learning of Furihata's long neglected love of horror, offering his own collection of books in response. 

Kuroko had sensed that Furihata wasn't very open with these interests so they had kept them mainly contained to the library and private chats on the way home if they stayed late distracted by books.

All the talk about fairy tales and romance and horror eventually led them to ghost stories. Kuroko had a wide collection of them. Some of which his mother, who studied folklore, had collected and written herself. 

It was during training camp one year while they were alone that they'd fallen into talking about stories as they often did when Kuroko had mentioned, quite casually that the home he'd lived in as a child had been haunted. Furihata hadn't thought he'd been serious at first. Most people when they told 'I saw a ghost' stories were telling them more for a reaction than true belief in Furihata's experience. Especially once they learned how much he believed in them.

Kuroko though had looked at him with the same seriousness he'd used when addressing his desire to defeat the Generation of Miracles and told him the entire story.

"It was the previous owner's spirit, Fujiwara-san. She had been a very elderly woman and simply didn't leave the house when she died. I remember someone watching me when I was very small and sometimes when I couldn't sleep I would hear a lullaby. My mother never sings, so I know it was not her. Fujiwara-san wasn't hostile, just lonely. When we moved I remember seeing her waving goodbye in the window, though my mother swears nothing was there."

That solidified both Furihata's trust in Kuroko with anything and his belief that if someone like Kuroko could believe in ghosts and see them than they could definitely be real. Kuroko excepted the supernatural as a possibility with the same ease he did the monsters they faced on the basketball court.

He would believe Furihata's story, especially if Furihata told him things only a close friend would know.

. . .

Furihata snuck out of the house when his mother went to do the grocery shopping. He'd made pains to swear he'd be fine and the second she disappeared around the corner he'd left. He felt a pang of guilt at the somewhat lie, he suspected he only got away with because his mother assumed all the paleness was due to illness. He would be _ fine. _He just wouldn't be home.

He would need to do something nice for his mother to make up for this later he decided firmly, walking quickly through the streets and keeping an eye out for police officers. The last thing he needed was to get mistaken for a truant even if it was technically true.

He managed to get to Kuroko's house and knock on the door all without thinking of how he was going to explain how he knew Kuroko to the boys' parents. It was only when faced with Kuroko's mother and her identical blue eyes to her son that he realized his mistake.

"Eh," Furihata said, mind stalling and then blurred out as much if the truth as he could. "I'm Furihata Kouki. Kuro-I mean Tetsuya's friend from basketball club?"

Kuroko Himawari had the same face as her son with the same round blue eyes and unusual pale hair and fair delicate skin. She was tall for a woman, the same height as Kuroko as well, but delicate looking despite this with a pretty face. Unlike Kuroko, Himawari never bothered to hide her emotions. She looked Furihata over with a befuddled expression, her eyebrows drawn taut, until all at once they relaxed and she started beaming.

"Oh, Testu-chan didn't tell me he befriended another witch! And a necromancer at that!" Himawari said expression a light and cheerful. "Oh, I have so many questions! Your clan is so rare after all."

Furihata's mind emptied for the third time today as the woman ushered him inside, chatting happily at him without him understanding a word.

_ Witch? _


End file.
